The “Slasher Film” has always been an iconic sub-genre of horror in American pop culture. Initially slasher films don’t seem to break the barriers of American Cinema; they still explore interesting aspects of the human psyche. Often we are thrown into the mind of our psychotic murderer, and then forced to live out his ritualistic killings. John Carpenter’s Halloween is a perfect example of a cliché slasher film. This film features some of the most common conventions of the horror genre. It thrusts us into the life of Michael Myers, an emotional stunted child who was raised in an insane asylum. It phallisizes the large knife that Myers wields during his rampage against young adults in the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois. …show more content…
The story takes place in a small town in Illinois. We open with a flashback of Myers’ early childhood. He is being babysat by his older sister, who happens to have a boyfriend over to fool around with. After the boyfriend leaves, young Myers, with the knife he grabs from the kitchen, proceeds to brutally murder his sister. This whole scene is done in one shot through the point of view of Michael. We, as the audience, are being told the story through Michael’s eyes. We feel the frustration he feels when he is denied the spectatorship of his sister fooling around. We feel the abandonment he feels when the boyfriend leaves so soon after this sexual encounter. We feel the neglect he feels when his sister doesn’t even notice he is nowhere to be found. We leave this flashback with a painting-esque image of young Myers holding a bloody knife as his late arriving parents stare at him motionless neglecting the fact that their daughter is This story continues with Dr. Loomis, the psychologist examining Myers. He advises the court to put him in a high security prison instead of a low security mental hospital. They …show more content…
As she sees nobody or nothing is there, she screams with fear. Halloween is a film that continues to follow the typical horror genre conventions. Thomas Schatz in his article Film Genre and the Genre Film puts the formula for a genre quite simply: “A genre film, like virtually any story, can be examined in terms of its fundamental narrative components: plot, setting, and character. These components have a privileged status for the popular audience, due to their existence within a familiar formula that addresses and reaffirms the audience’s values and attitudes” (695). With this, we can start to dissect the components of Halloween to identify it as a slasher film. First off we need to define the slasher genre. Here we can use the help of Carol Clover with her essay Her Body, Himself where she briefly defines the slasher: “At the bottom of the horror heap lies the slasher film: the immensely generative story of a psychokiller who slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is subdued or killed…” (21). Here we already have some of the elements of Halloween such as: the psychokiller, a string of female murders (until we explore the
To begin with, some people would say they enjoy a horror movie that gets them scared out of their wits. They go see these movies once a month on average, for fun, each time choosing a newer sequel like “Final Destination” or “The evil Dead”. King says “When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a theater showing a horror movie we are daring the nightmare” (405). As a writer of best-sel...
Analysis of the Opening Sequences of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Wes Craven’s Scream (1996)
Near the end, when he walks into his room he falls to his hands and knees and looks
Lorie Myers begins the film Halloween as a normal, happy teenager and everything in life is fine. Michael is the brother of Lorie and he is locked up in an insane asylum for murdering his older sister Edith. He eventually escapes and decides he wants to murder his sister Lorie. Lorie is unaware that she has an older brother because she is adopted by another family when she was an infant. On Halloween night, Lorie is babysitting and her friends are being murdered. Lorie losses everything and she had done nothing wrong. Michael blames Lorie for the situation because of her relationship to him. Lorie is traumatized from Michael terrorizing her, but she makes it out alive. As the Halloween series progressed, Lorie becomes successful, but the fear
Friedman, L., Desser, D., Kozloff, S., Nichimson, M., & Prince, S. (2014). An introduction to film genres. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company.
sample, but it also appeals to population and emotion. To further explain why we crave
Film scholars around the world agree that all genres of film are part of the “genre cycle”. This cycle contains four different stages that a specific genre goes through. These stages are: primitive, classic, revisionist, and parody. Each stage that the genre goes through brings something different to that genre’s meaning and what the audience expects. I believe that looking at the horror genre will be the most beneficial since it has clearly gone through each stage.
him to go to his house as "some nigger'd reaped his girl". Later on in
the garage. Sam loves to drink blood. "Go out and kills" commands father Sam. Behind
"Horror Movies 2013." movieweb.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Dec 2013. .Noton, Adriana. "A Brief History Of Horror Movies." Ezine Articles. Spark Net, 10 Aug. 2010. Web. 1 Dec. 2013. .
Too many horror films provide scares and screams throughout their respective cinemas. Not many viewers follow what kind of model the films follow to appease their viewers. However, after reading film theorist Carol Clover’s novel, watching one of the films she associates in the novel “Halloween”, and also watching the movie “Nightmare on Elm Street” I say almost every “slasher” or horror film follows a model similar to Clover’s. The model is a female is featured as a primary character and that females tend to always overcome a situation at some point throughout the film.
In Hollywood today, most films can be categorized according to the genre system. There are action films, horror flicks, Westerns, comedies and the likes. On a broader scope, films are often separated into two categories: Hollywood films, and independent or foreign ‘art house’ films. Yet, this outlook, albeit superficial, was how many viewed films. Celebrity-packed blockbusters filled with action and drama, with the use of seamless top-of-the-line digital editing and special effects were considered ‘Hollywood films’. Films where unconventional themes like existentialism or paranoia, often with excessive violence or sex or a combination of both, with obvious attempts to displace its audiences from the film were often attributed with the generic label of ‘foreign’ or ‘art house’ cinema.
Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981.
Since the release of George Melies’s The Haunted Castle in 1896, over 90,000 horror films have been made. However, none have been more frightening and influential than that of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Each a product of horror’s 1970’s and 80’s golden era, the films have a reputation of engulfing viewers in fear, without the use of masked killers, vampires, or other clichés. Instead, Kubrick and Spielberg take a different approach and scare audiences on a psychological level. The Shining and Jaws evoke fear through the use of three different film aspects: the use of a “danger” color, daunting soundtracks, and suspenseful cinematography.